DANIEL BORDA
Painting is temperament, vision, atmosphere, it is character: The secrets of image and its movements, the clarity of line, the phantoms of the shadows, the balance of the tone and the light trying to give a condition to beauty, that delicate splendor that perpetuates the instant turning it to a myth. Painting levitates, irradiates, it is a metaphor; they are forms and times that walk towards the unconscious to decorate its halls, its rooms. Its elements, like the ones of the written language are visual metaphors; they are moving image, a poetic series of time, space and climate that stay within us that come together in chilling harmony. Forms live together like children in a wood, they come together and clarify. In painting there is a kind of music that fills our inner ear that fulfills our scarcities with its timbre, modulations and drum strokes; it transform our silence filling it with harmony. Painting is a successive appearance, an emblematic doing that gathers itself in the pupil, it is the limitless substance that promises its fraction of infinity to the gaze and delights it,offers its lost paradise.
Daniel Borda’s painting is an ambitious game with nature and its magic, a permanent search of the fantasy in objects, an esthetic reality that allows giving prominence to the details, to the trifle, creating unbalance, confusion, irony for it invades with strong accent inspired in classic topics, in tones that dramatize the colors, that do at the same time sedate, tranquilize, and in the same way his lines make a reading of an anachronistic and very suggestive surrealism. The fruits that Daniel Borda pulls out from his unconscious still-lifes to put them in his landscapes or to recreate a typical scenarios in a typical places, show his untiring sense of humor, an overwhelming lucidity, not common in Colombian painting, and beyond its multiple meanings, his work has to do with his way of assuming the world, his own language and the exasperated solitude, his phantoms, the many mysteries of his childhood and that particular way of stretching his astonishment. His work is full with atmospheres that simplify his states of mind, it is the underlying model ofthe rhythms of a man rooted in his talent trying to blend the characteristics of the image, trying to seduce each moment of the nature that it inhabits, he tries to silence its cry. Daniel Borda, from his ivory tower, from his atelier, tries to answer those unsolved mysteries that sometimes have no sense but carry him to the search for his essence, his true eternal plan.
Octavio Paz, considered the Mexican of the XX century, in his poem Objects and Appearances, dedicated to Joseph Cornell, writes:
“Hexahedrons made of wood and glass
Just a little bigger than a shoebox
Night with its lamps fit in them.”
That poetics of the conceptual art is useful to see how far dream reaches its higher grade of irony and also its sarcastic sensefor esthetic, we are able to perceive how the interior search for the objects decorates the senses, it gives them force, animates them. And then, in the same text he mentions Edgar Degas: “A painting has to be made the same way one commits a crime”. This is boundless, but at the same time it is an individual rhetoric that survives further than the idea itself. That is why the paintings of Daniel Borda survive the chaos that germinates them; they survive that plastic intention of abolishing reality and maybe abolish correcting her, or even better, enthrone reality in a less characteristic concept through another language. His pictorial impulses are words with form and color that speak of other dimensions; their characters think and act in a self-absorbed surreal fiction.
It is dawn at the atelier. The colors have a new soul. The jars, full with pencils, full with oil paintings, full with irrational silences, gravitate; the turpentine gravitates, the easels, the canvases, the brushes that are also brooms to sweep in other dimensions, gravitate. The words that are not there could arrive any moment. Here is a start to the time, here starts the path to the mysteries of beauty, and here the astonishment is produced. Art history is made out of mirage, of hallucinations that start in an atelier. Daniel Borda arrives from the night, from his dark geometries to recognize himself again in the elements, to illuminate himself; his white mind borders the abysses of color and magic storms, and starting early in the morning he makes light a personal evidence. He invokes its significance, and this is his first trip. Such a ritual happens before his work occurs. I perceive the anonymous movement of his invisible chess play board, he determines the path of a discipline that has helped him to get rid of himself and of his night elves, for in many of his interior geographies, in those territories that will be the territories of the gaze, the painter always follows the path of a hilarious, mysterious, and sometimes terrible being. That is why the drawings and the engravings harbor an intense eye, a lens with its lamp that travels through the woods of his obstinate intelligence, through their deep foliage and keeps filling a personal universe, a kind of private mythology of image. His work is silent, bright, it is a polished art, with a delirious but silent humor that has hold a double character, because he recognizes himself in the miracles of a personal esthetic, but at the same time he judges himself through it and in the same way he plans his romantic interior exile. However, in the color dialectic that survives him there is a clear excitation for work, for surrender, for a sick inclination to beauty and its numerous behaviors. He says to his own phantoms:
“The wonderful outcome of turning yourself into a life of painting is the satisfaction of daring to bet ones’ own energies in a way of living that despite any difficulty that you find in the way, you will always be ready to defend the passion and the love you professes to this profession where everything vibrates with and as light”.
His landscapes are contaminated with a visceral and splendid surrealism, his fruits represent a metaphor of common sense, for they branch off reality; they split reality and then he makes a wink. He hurts our sensibility, he questions us, maybe because of the incongruence of his architecture, but at the same time he reconciles us with that other self that loves sarcasm, that rows in another perspective and shuffles other plans longing for a different search, for other symbols, for a different dynamic that allows the dream of reason recreate its own true ghosts, that allows to explore in the vast roundness of its water and reflect on it.
Poetry is a tireless search for a new metaphor, for another symbolic universe, and painting changes its optics in the search of another fascination that can move its capacity of astonishment and also noticeable intimate miseries; as well as sometimes painting tries, in an impulse towards introspection, an impulse of depriving, to avoid the objects and stay alone.
Daniel Borda internalizes each stroke and slowly goes down through his lines until he reaches that face that is waiting for him at the verge. His own crystalized face is an idea, in a negation, in a different symbol, so his playing with the instinct of forms prospers thanks to his trip to color, to the abysm of a canvas, he always allows himself to be penetrated by the myths of his innocence.
At the inventory time, he looks at himself at the broken mirror and thinks over:
“I think my greatest motivation when painting, or carrying out any creative labor, is an evocation, being able to re-awake in a marked and deep remembrance of my childhood.”
In an emotional effort, away from academies, Daniel Borda has been inspired in a work that has trespassed some established values, its forms and ideas illuminate a time in which nature was left alone, in which elements needed the magic of a hand that would animate them, and that esthetic emotion is what moves his spirit, those many dilemmas that overwhelm his spirit and that exhaust him; he pluralizes his knowledge, he exteriorizes it in delicate shades and rhythms where the intelligence of objects turns into light and dramatize that moment of having been touched by time. Daniel Borda has an emphasized lyricism in his stroke, and that permanent poetic dialogue in his painting is what creates the sentimental education of the colors, as is his permanent love for appearance and obsession for the objects and their phantoms, for the presence that moves him or perpetrates his chaos. The live nature of all his work is a silent thinking about the lost landscape, it is a tireless search of an unexplored region,and he searches the maps, the labyrinths, the guides, the stations, and the woods in each surface.
In one of the shores of the road towards the path of Art History he warns us:
“For me surrealism is the key for the existential liberation of our reality, or put in other words, surrealism allows us to play escaping from the pre-established parameters in our schemes or limits … and in the fruits I paint I find the secret to the auto- perpetuation of life”.
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